Insomnia vs Bruno: Which One Should You Use?

Switch to Bruno if you want every API collection stored as plain-text files inside your Git repository, with no account, login, or cloud connection required. Switch to, or stay on, Insomnia if your team needs broader protocol coverage out of the box (REST, GraphQL, gRPC), flexible storage choices per project, and Kong's enterprise backing as requirements grow. Neither tool is a strict upgrade over the other; they optimize for different things, and the sections below walk through storage, accounts, licensing, protocol coverage, and what a real migration between them involves before you commit.

How Each Tool Stores Your Collections

Bruno saves every request as a plain text .bru file that lives directly on disk inside your project folder, built for Git tracking. Insomnia takes the opposite approach: it gives you a per-project choice between a local vault, Git sync, or an encrypted cloud sync tied to a Kong account. Insomnia's own site markets this as a feature in its own right, with sections titled "Store data locally, via Git, or in the cloud" and "Mandate data locality".

The practical difference shows up the first time you change a request and open a pull request. Because a .bru file is plain text, a renamed header or a new assertion reads as an ordinary line-level diff, the same as a code change, and a reviewer never has to leave the pull request to see what changed. Insomnia can produce that same kind of diff when a workspace is set to local storage or Git sync, but the moment a team switches a workspace to Kong's encrypted cloud sync, the collection stops living in your repository at all, so there is nothing left for a reviewer to diff, and a change to a request only shows up inside Insomnia itself.

This is also a differentiator independent write-ups of this exact comparison build around directly: one third-party breakdown structures its whole argument around three core differences between these clients, leading with what the underlying file actually is. If your team already reviews every change through a pull request, deciding where the collection actually lives, on disk as text or inside a vendor's storage, matters more than either tool's interface.

Accounts, Logins, and Cloud Requirements

Bruno requires no login, no account creation, and no connection to any cloud service at all. You install it, point it at a folder, and start sending requests; there is no sign-up screen standing between you and the tool. Bruno's own comparison page treats this as important enough to put directly in its FAQ, asking outright "Does Bruno require an account or the cloud?".

Insomnia sits in the middle. You can run it entirely locally without ever creating an account, but the moment you want to sync a workspace across your own devices or collaborate with teammates, you need to sign in to Kong's cloud. For a solo developer working from one machine, that distinction may never come up. For a team, it means someone is deciding whether collaboration happens through Git, the way Bruno forces it to, or through a vendor account, the way Insomnia's sync features require.

This is worth checking against your own constraints before you pick a tool: a team under a contractual or regulatory requirement to keep API credentials and request data off third-party infrastructure has a simpler compliance story with Bruno, since there is no account tier to reason about in the first place.

Licensing, Backing, and Project Maturity

Bruno is MIT-licensed open source software, while Insomnia is licensed under Apache 2.0 with enterprise backing from Kong. Neither license restricts how you use the free tier of either tool, but the backing differs: Bruno is community-maintained, while Insomnia has a company funding its roadmap and offering paid enterprise tiers on top of the open core.

Community size is one rough signal of how much a project has settled. As of this SERP capture, the usebruno/bruno repository on GitHub carried 43,069 stars against 39,952 for Kong/insomnia, putting the two within a few thousand stars of each other, with neither clearly dwarfing the other. Star counts describe how much developer attention a project has attracted, not how complete its feature set is or how well it fits your workflow, so treat this as one data point among the others in this guide, not a tiebreaker on its own.

Protocol and Feature Coverage

Insomnia supports REST, GraphQL, and gRPC out of the box, alongside heavier collaboration tooling built around those protocols. Its own site lists "Confidently Design APIs," native API mocking, and automated testing at scale among its headline sections, reflecting a product built to cover a broad protocol surface, not one request type.

Bruno is positioned as a lighter, focused request builder: it does not ship built-in mock servers or monitoring.

Where the evidence runs out is WebSocket support and finer-grained protocol parity between the two. A third-party comparison of Postman, Bruno, and Insomnia poses the exact question "Does Bruno support GraphQL, gRPC, and WebSockets?" as something buyers are actively asking, which tells you the question matters, but neither that page nor the other sources gathered for this guide give a sourced, specific answer on Bruno's WebSocket support. If gRPC, GraphQL, or WebSocket testing is a hard requirement, not a nice-to-have, verify current protocol support directly against each tool's own documentation before you commit, instead of relying on this or any other comparison.

Switching Between Them: What Actually Happens

Neither tool publishes an Insomnia-to-Bruno migration guide, but Bruno's own documentation for migrating from Postman describes the general shape any collection-based migration into Bruno takes, and it is worth walking through before you commit to a switch.

The process is not a single import step. Bruno's docs separate collection export from environment handling entirely: you export your collection first, and then, as a distinct step, export and import your environments, with Bruno's docs walking through importing your first environment and then adding to existing ones. Scripts are not carried over silently either. Bruno's docs describe an explicit "preserve scripts on import" option you must turn on, instead of assuming every script survives the move automatically.

Read across to an Insomnia export, the same shape applies: expect to move the collection, move environments as a separate pass, and then check every script by hand instead of trusting an automatic carry-over. What none of the sources gathered for this guide specify is what happens to authentication setups, OAuth flows, vault-stored secrets, and similar, during a migration between these two tools. Treat that as unverified instead of assuming it either breaks or survives, and budget time to re-configure auth manually and re-test it after any import.

Bruno's own comparison page also fields the direct question of collection and environment portability in its FAQ, "Can I import my Postman collections and environments into Bruno?", which is consistent with the export and import path its migration docs describe.

In practice, treat this as a two-pass job, not a single afternoon: bring over collections first and confirm requests run, then bring over environments and confirm variables resolve, then go through scripts one at a time. Doing all three in one pass is where teams tend to lose track of what actually transferred.

Which One Fits Your Team

Pull the criteria above together and two profiles stand out, not one overall winner.

Bruno fits a team that wants every collection change reviewed the way code is reviewed, with no account, no cloud dependency, and no per-seat vendor relationship to manage. If your API testing habit is small and deliberately kept that way, request-building without mock servers, monitoring dashboards, or a broader product suite around it, Bruno's scope matches the job.

Insomnia fits a team that needs the broader ecosystem underneath the client: flexible storage choices depending on the project, broader protocol coverage out of the box, and Kong's enterprise backing for when collections stop scaling on a single lightweight client. That flexibility has a cost, which is the account and cloud-sync layer covered above, but it buys optionality Bruno does not offer.

Neither tool currently has a truly independent, vendor-neutral comparison written for exactly this decision; what exists today is each vendor's own site, each vendor's own docs, and a handful of third-party blogs. That gap is precisely why dev.tools had no page naming Insomnia at all before this one, and why the criteria above, storage, accounts, licensing, protocol coverage, and the real migration path, are worth checking against your own requirements instead of taking either vendor's framing at face value.

Where a CI-Native Runner Like DevTools Fits

Everything above compares two interactive clients: tools you open, point at an API, and click or type requests into by hand. Neither Insomnia nor Bruno is primarily built to be a CI test runner, even though both can run collections from a command line.

DevTools takes a different starting point. It is one of the open-source API testing tools that chains multi-step requests into reusable YAML workflows, records real traffic, auto-maps variables between steps, and runs those tests in CI with parallel execution and JUnit reports. It ships as a CLI, with flows, templates, and a hosted option for teams built around that same YAML workflow.

If the decision in front of you is really "which interactive client do I use day to day," this guide's criteria apply directly. If it is closer to "how do our API tests run as a required check on every pull request," a CI-native runner is worth adding alongside, not instead of, whichever client you land on above.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Bruno really free for teams, or is there a catch?

Bruno's client is free and open source under the MIT license, with no account or cloud connection required to use it. Whether that holds for larger teams is exactly the question a third-party comparison of these tools poses directly, but none of the sources gathered for this guide capture Bruno's specific team or paid-tier pricing, so verify current pricing on Bruno's own site before assuming free scales to your whole team.

Is Insomnia a free tool, or does it require a paid plan?

Insomnia's own site advertises an open-source, free tier, and it can be used locally without creating an account at all. This guide's sources do not capture Insomnia's specific paid-plan pricing, so check Insomnia's own pricing page for current figures before assuming the free tier covers your team's needs.

Is Insomnia better than Postman?

This guide compares Insomnia and Bruno only, and none of its sources give a sourced verdict on Insomnia versus Postman. If Postman is also part of your evaluation, see this site's Bruno vs Postman comparison for how Bruno stacks up against Postman on the same storage, account, and CI criteria used here.

There is no universal winner between Insomnia and Bruno; the right choice depends on how your team already works, not on which tool has more features. If reviewing every collection change through a pull request matters more than a broad product suite, Bruno's Git-native, account-free model fits. If your team needs wider protocol coverage, flexible storage, and a vendor standing behind the roadmap, Insomnia fits better. Either way, budget real time for the switch itself: exporting collections and environments as separate steps, and rechecking every script by hand instead of assuming an automatic import.